This section is intended to provide a background or context to some embodiments. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Enhancements to mobile communication system are currently being investigated to improve the experience of mobile users who use those systems. In particular, the investigation has focused on enhancing the enjoyment by providing consistent performance and quality when mobile users access and share videos, photos and other high-bandwidth services, whether they are close to the center of an long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) cell or at its outer edges. Currently, the emphasis has been placed on enhancing downlink (DL) transmissions while ignoring enhancements to uplink (UL) reception in such edge transmission/reception improving solutions. Moreover, solutions to date involving coordination among UL reception points have required an additional backhaul infrastructure needed to transfer data among the different reception points and which may require significant bandwidth.
The following abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the Figures are defined as follows:
3GPP third generation partnership project
AFC Automatic frequency control
BS base station
BW bandwidth
CM cubic metric
CoMP coordinated multi-point
CQI channel quality indication
CP Cyclic Prefix
CRS common reference signal
CS cyclic shift
CSI channel state information
DCI downlink control information
DL downlink (eNB towards UE)
DMRS demodulation reference signal
eNB E-UTRAN Node B (evolved Node B)
EPC evolved packet core
E-UTRAN evolved UTRAN (LTE)
FDMA frequency division multiple access
FFT Fast Fourier Transformation
HSPA high speed packet access
IFDM interleaved frequency-division multiplexing
IMT-A international mobile telephony-advanced
ITU international telecommunication union
ITU-R ITU radio communication sector
LLR Log-Likelihood Ratio
LTE long term evolution of UTRAN (E-UTRAN)
LTE-A LTE advanced
MAC medium access control (layer 2, L2)
MIMO multiple input multiple output
MM/MME mobility management/mobility management entity
MU-MIMO multi-user multiple input multiple output
Node B base station
OCC orthogonal cover code
OFDMA orthogonal frequency division multiple access
O&M operations and maintenance
PDCCH packet downlink control channel
PDCP packet data convergence protocol
PHY physical (layer 1, L1)
PMI precoding matrix indication
PRB physical resource block
PUCCH physical uplink control channel
PUSCH physical uplink shared channel
RAN1 technical specification group radio access network working group 1
Rel release
RLC radio link control
RRC radio resource control
RRH remote radio head
RRM radio resource management
S-GW serving gateway
SC-FDMA single carrier, frequency division multiple access
TPMI transmit precoding matrix index
UE user equipment, such as a mobile station, mobile node or mobile terminal
UL uplink (UE towards eNB)
UTRAN universal terrestrial radio access network